


Our Bodies, Possessed By Light

by runsinthefamily



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Clairestiel: Cas as Claire Novak, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:04:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily





	Our Bodies, Possessed By Light

She’s in Chemistry when she first hears it. 

_**Claire.** _

A whisper at the very edge of hearing. She turns, looks at Gavin Freisen behind her, finds him busy at work on his formulas. It didn’t sound like him, anyway. It didn’t sound like anyone. 

“Claire.” Mrs. Johnson speaks her name firmly. “Eyes on your paper, please.”

She ducks her head, flushing, and writes down the chemical composition of baking soda.

***

“Claire?” 

She blinks, and looks at her father, at his rumpled hair and blue eyes. His tie hangs askew. One long narrow hand is wrapped around his water glass and the other is halfway across the table to her, palm upward. 

“Are you alright?” He smiles, though his brow is creased. “You looked about a million miles away, bud.”

“I’m fine, Daddy,” she says. “I was just-“ listening “-thinking.”

“Okay,” he says.

Her mother is looking at her, too. “Finish your peas,” she says, and shares a smile out between Claire and her father.

“May I be excused?” She shovels up a quick forkful of peas to appease her mother, who sighs and then nods.

In her bedroom she leans toward the mirror, examining her short, straight nose, her grey eyes, the blonde hair her mother won’t let her cut. What do crazy people look like? 

She dreams that night. Wings and blood and a man, tall and green eyed and angry. Inside him it’s all red and black. And then wind, wind like the end of the world, blowing everything away, blowing the flesh off her bones. _**Claire.  
**_  
She sits straight up, panting, her throat raw, and her mother slams through the door.

“Claire, baby, what is it?”

Arms around her, her father in the doorway with panic in his eyes.

“I don’t know, I don’t remember.” She weeps against her mother’s shoulder.

***

Halfway through Hannah Montana, the picture begins to fuzz and then warp. She prods the remote without result, then sighs and gets up to flip the power on and off. “Mom,” she calls. “The t.v. is going weird.”

“Turn it off, then,” is her mother’s unsympathetic response.

“I’m trying!” She jabs the power switch again, to no avail. The scrambled white noise grows louder, grows teeth. “Ow,” she mutters, and then “ow, ow!” Hands to her ears, she back away. The remote drops from her hand to the glass coffee table and spills its batteries to the floor.

“Jeez, don’t wreck the place.” She can hardly hear her mother.

“Mom,” she says. The noise is a single piercing note, stabbing through her head. “Mom, make it stop! Make it -!”

Everything disappears into white, into the note.

***

“Seizures,” the doctor says, but Claire knows better. When it happens again, the buds of her iPod growing warm in her ears, the note isn’t so loud, and it splits itself again and again until it’s a chorus of glory.

 _ **Claire**_ , it sings to her. _ **Claire.**_

“I’m here,” she says. “Who are you?”

_**Castiel.** _

“You’re an angel,” she says, “right?”

_**Yes.** _

Pride. Approval. It thrills her to her toes. ”What do you want?”

***

Her mother comes home while she is in the middle of it, with predictable results.

“Claire!” she shrieks, and drops the groceries.

“Mom!” says Claire, holding up a hand. “Look!” She pulls her other hand out of the boiling water, shows her clear, unmarked skin. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“Get away from the stove,” says her mother, voice trembling.

Claire climbs down off the stool, submits to her mother’s hug, her mother’s scolding, her mother’s tears. 

Later that evening, she waits in her room while her parents speak downstairs, voices rising and falling. Her father is the one who comes in eventually, his shoulders hunched a little, his eyes direct.

“You mom told me about your stunt,” he says.

“I’m sorry she was scared,” she says. “I didn’t think she’d be back so soon.”

He sits on the bed, takes her hand in his, strokes the skin of her palm. “What’s going on, Claire?”

“I can tell you, but you won’t believe me,” she says.

“Try me,” he offers.

“It was a miracle,” she says. She watches his face draw in with worry and pain. It hurts her. “It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t believe me. That’s okay.”

***

Her mother finds the pills, stashed behind her dresser, and there is a Family Meeting in the living room, Claire sitting on the couch with her hands folded in her lap, and her mother and father across from her in the armchairs. Her mother looks furious and afraid. Her father looks tired and afraid. She is sorry to the bottom of her heart for making them upset, but she can feel Castiel even now, a humming in her bones and she can’t be sorry for that.

“You have to take them, Claire,” says her father. “We don’t want you to have another seizure.”

“I won’t,” she says. “That was a mistake. He won’t do that again.”

“Stop it,” says her mother. “Just – stop, Claire.”

”I know you don’t believe it,” says Claire, “but it’s true.”

“There are no angels speaking to you!” Her mother’s hands close into fists.

“His name is Castiel,” says Claire. “He says he needs my help, that I’m special.”

“You are special,” says her father, leaning forward. “You don’t need an angel talking to you to make you special.” He looks at her mother and then back to her. “We want you to go see a doctor,” he says.

“A shrink,” she says.

“A psychologist,” corrects her father. “Because we’re worried about you. Please? All you have to do is talk. Tell him about Castiel.”

“Okay,” she says, because she can’t stand the look on his face anymore, the lines across his brow deep as cuts.

“Okay,” he says.

Her mother wipes at tears and smiles. “Thank you, baby,” she says. “You know we love you.”

“I know,” says Claire.

***

She has her thirteenth birthday at home. None of her friends come. She’s the weird girl now, the one seeing a shrink, the one who hears voices in her head. She eats hamburgers and cake with her parents and then goes up to her room.

She’s supposed to be journaling for Dr. Adams, but instead she pulls on her thickest hoodie and climbs out her window to sit on the slope of the roof, staring up into the sky.

“They’re going to send me away,” she says. “They’re calling it a retreat but it’s the looney bin, really. I’m.” She stops, swallows. “I’m scared, Castiel,” she goes on, in a whisper. “I won’t deny you, I won’t be Peter, but I – I just. Please tell me. Why? Why me?” Tears overspill her eyelashes, track down her face.

The humming swells in her bones, in her blood, warming her in the cold October night. She feels bathed in light.

_**You are special, Claire.** _

“But what does that mean?”

_**It means that I need your help. It’s time.** _

“Time for what?” she breathes.

_**Do you love God?** _

“Yes,” she says, fervently.

_**I have work to do, in His Name. To do that work, I must walk the earth. And to walk the earth, I need a willing vessel to hold my Grace. I need you.** _

Claire quivers in the light, terrified and transported. “You want – you mean –“

_**Will you grant me permission to inhabit your flesh?** _

Glory is everywhere. She can hear wings beating the air with slow purpose. “Can I see you?”

_**You can.** _

He – she- it – no words fit the being that solidifies in front of her, hanging in the air just past the slightly rusted eavestrough. She knows she’s looking at Castiel, but she can’t make out any details, not really. There are a thousand wings, and then just two. A face, or four, or none. There are shapely limbs, or wheels of fire, or strings of living writing in a language she can almost comprehend.

_**Will you help me?** _

“Yes,” she says. She reaches out. Castiel reaches, too, and when her fingertips brush against feathers/fingers/fire everything is white, everything is music, everything is Glory. She is caught up, cradled, crushed, buried in love like a mountain, astonished by the galaxy-spanning vastness of Castiel’s perception .

_**Sleep.** _

And for a year, Claire sleeps.

***

Castiel stands up, unfolding her limbs slowly, testing their function. She lifts one small hand and flexes it, learning the subtle elegance of fingers and thumb, twisting the slender wrist.

“Claire!”

She turns and looks back through the window into Claire’s room. Jimmy Novak is standing in the doorway, fear painted across his face. Another vessel, but his prayers had not been as loud as his daughter’s, his faith not as strong.

“Claire, come back in, baby,” he says. “Come on, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m not your daughter,” Castiel tells him, as gently as possible, and then steps off the roof. Jimmy Novak’s shout of horror is cut off as Castiel spreads her wings and flies to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where the Righteous Man and his foster father wait in a barn.


End file.
